


my favorite foods are smoke and hearts

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Content Warning: Ianthe Tridentarius, F/F, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Unhealthy Relationships, Vaginal Fingering, the inherent body horror of getting fingered with a skeleton hand, ye olde fantasy flesh-magic strap-on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27987261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Ianthe would kiss Harrow’s lungs, if she could. Chill one of her eyes and pop it like a grape against her molars.It’s just that Harrow looks so fucking sad, all the time, it’s just like holding a blown-out eggshell, a blood-bubble caught in glass, and trying to remember not to squeeze. The inherent homoeroticism of blackmail. Something like that.She's maybe a little bit in love.They fuck about it.
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 12
Kudos: 141





	my favorite foods are smoke and hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jess and Cam for editing services, luv u. Title from "Appreciation Day in Vestal, NY (Bones)" by Will Wood and the Tapeworms.

Her room on the Mithraeum is the kind of place that people say has good bones—great big ribs of ceiling, high-hocked doorways, round, sockety windows to let the light in—as if bone was ever good for anything but cracking open and rendering down. As if there’s any light. It was novel, for about fifteen fucking minutes, having a room all to herself, and then for about five afterward, it was vaguely comforting to know that it had been somebody else’s first, and then the charm wore off and the whole thing took on a maggoty nauseousness. 

Still.

Good bones.

In the dark, the bones of her hand are an oily blue-black, slanting against the flatter (shittier) grey-black of the ceiling behind. The colors don’t quite match, which is always the trouble with blacks, but you know, when you love somebody you make an effort. Learn your lampblack from your onyx from your perylene. 

So:

It’s dark (black), and there are shapes (also black); Harrow, twisting uneasily beside her, because she never learned how to share a bed, knees hiked up to her chin and her hair (also fucking black) cutting across the pillow like the big, black end of everything.

Good bones. You could do something with that, couldn’t you?

“We say it’s got good teeth,” Ianthe murmurs, lowering her hand. “Back home.”

Harrow frowns at her groggily, too fucked-out and too slow to dodge the press of one gilded thumb bone against the tight line of her brow.

“Careful, Harry,” Ianthe croons, “your face might freeze that way.”

She tugs the other girl to her chest, spine to sternum, smoothing back the wild blackness of her hair. It’s soft under her hand, it feels—it _feels_ , she can feel Harrow’s hair in and on and in between the bones of her hand, on the flats of the bone and the space between them, and they’re still slick from fucking Harrow out of a nightmare, just to see if the fear-sweat catching in her collarbones tasted any different than the regular kind.

(It does, but only a little. Sour. Anyway, eating pussy, eating someone’s kidney—what’s the difference? It’s all soft parts, soft, cannibal-candy pink. Kidney, cunt, liver. She’d kiss Harrow’s lungs, if she could. Chill one of her eyes and pop it like a grape against her molars.)

It’s just that Harrow looks so fucking sad, all the time, it’s just like holding a blown-out eggshell, a blood-bubble caught in glass, and trying to remember not to squeeze. The inherent homoeroticism of blackmail. Something like that.

She tucks her face into Harrow’s shoulder, teeth set against the flutter of her pulse. Ianthe skims her meat hand down the thin, flat flanks in front of her, and Harrow shudders, and digs her nails into Ianthe’s wrist (meat), but doesn’t pull away. 

“Harry,” she croons again, thumbing (bone) at the little swell of her breast, “I don’t suppose I could convince you to stop wearing that god-awful paint to bed,” and tugs the other girl’s nipple until she hisses and bucks, eyes blown black and furious, “because you’re ruining the sheets.”

As if she didn’t coax Harrow into them in the first place. This is what is called “doing a bit”. Another thing Harrow never learned.

Ianthe edges her palm (bone) between Harrow’s legs—she presses her legs together ineffectually, barely more than token protest—drags one finger through her soft, swollen folds, over her clit. 

“An anchorite is not seen—”

“But I have,” Ianthe croons into her neck and Harrow clamps her legs shut, harder this time, and wrenches at the ball of Ianthe’s shoulder with a shivery ripple of thanergy.

“I _have_ seen you without the paint, sweet thing,” Ianthe repeats. She worries at the meat of Harrow’s shoulder with the edges of her teeth. “You were very cruel to me, you know. Said all kinds of nasty things.”

Poor Harry. Sweet baby Harrow the Not-Ninth-Anymore, nobody ever held that girl after a nightmare; for all she knows, this is just what it’s like. Ianthe fits her hand (meat) to the curve of Harrow’s neck, tipping her chin up. Harrow locks Ianthe’s hand (bone) into a rigid snarl of carpals, and pins her hand to the mattress.

“You held my head just like this,” Ianthe croons, “and you had these great big needles— _enormous_ things. I thought for a minute you might be compensating for something.”

“Sacrilege.”

“Yes, you told me so the first time.”

“And nonsensical,” Harrow snaps, “nobody would—”

“Really? It’s practically the first thing anybody tries with flesh magic.Takes a bit to get the hang of the size and the wiring—you can always tell when somebody’s fucked it up, some dickhead staggering to Medical with their dick head on inside out.”

She drags her thumb (meat) over the line of Harrow's mouth, and Harrow snaps again, teeth clicking together around nothing as Ianthe twitches her hand away,

“You are an infidel and a pervert,” she hisses.

“You said that, too. Threatened to shoot my condyles out through my eyeballs.” A thready trickle of blood slips over the shell of Harrow’s ear, tracing shyly down the hinge of her jaw. Ianthe nuzzles into her neck, tongue flicking out to catch a bead of intracranial hemorrhage on the tip of her tongue like a snowflake. It melts like candy floss against her lips.

“Coronoid,” Harrow sniffs haughtily—unsteadily, swaying slightly. She’s bleeding more heavily now, enough that the weight of her blood drags it down the side of her neck in a weedy tangle. Her grasp on Ianthe’s hand (bone) shudders and bucks, necromancy slipping as her brain sags under the bloodloss. “You have a shockingly poor grasp of mandibular anatomy for a cannibal.”

“Bones,” Ianthe says lightly, “are fucking _boring_ , and I truly cannot stress enough how little I care to know the difference between one sticky-out bit and the next.”

(It wouldn’t be hard to learn. Not really. When you love somebody, you make an effort.)

“But,” she continues, streaking Harrow’s blood very tenderly up towards her hair, “I _did_ promise not to talk about all that.”

Harrow lets her head drop back onto Ianthe’s shoulder, eyes closed against what must be a truly agonizing squeeze of skull on brain. Ianthe smooths her hair away from her face again, fingers (meat) carding through tangles (black) that only exist because Ianthe made them exist. She teases one undone with her nails, murmuring vague, soothing nothings with the ease of habit, and watching Harrow’s pulse pound wildly against the papery brown skin of her throat. Ianthe leans back, weight in her knees and her thumb (bone) slotted into the groove of Harrow’s hip and gently, gently smoothes her legs apart. Drags the pads of fingers (bone) just _barely_ over the the swollen lips of her cunt, barely touching, until Harrow tosses her head and sniffs: “ _Enough._ ”

“You could ask me nicely.” 

“I would rather be crushed beneath the Rock,” Harrow pants, “and my bones powdered to ash, and all the relics of my house with them—”

“Have it your way, then,” Ianthe sighs, and pushes into Harrow all at once, long gold phalanges sunk in up to the last knuckle. Harrow gasps, high and thin, a shuddering little noise that trails off into a satisfied hum. Ianthe crooks her fingers (bone) against the velvety blood-heat of Harrow’s cunt, rubbing tight circles that make her moan and twitch, working her hand like she could pull all of Harrow’s blackest, meanest secrets out of her from the inside. She slides her hand (meat) down to the hollow nest of Harrow’s belly, pulling Harrow back tight against her chest.

Harrow’s skin is hot and thin and papery, drawn taut over the shuddering tightness of her ribs. Ianthe palms (meat) urgently at her tits, pinching one nipple between her fingers and _twisting_ , pulling until Harrow gasps, high and sharp, head bucking up into her neck. Harrow’s teeth are small and even and white, bared in a flinching, breathy cry. Ianthe circles her areola, soothing, because Harrow can’t stand to be soothed, and Ianthe is ecstatic in the union of petty victory and a good fuck, panting into Harrow’s hair, and pitching them both forward to push Harrow’s painted face into the mattress, folded over her back.

Ianthe drags her hand (bone) all the way from Harrow’s clit up to her tailbone, when she can feel Harrow’s prim little shudder of polite disgust and horrified arousal when she wipes her fingers off on Harrow’s naked hip. 

“Easy, Ninth,” she murmurs, “you’re alright.”

God, but lying really is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. That, and highly experimental brain surgery. You never forget your first time. She buries her face in Harrow’s hair.

Ianthe sinks her fingers (bone) back into Harrow’s cunt, and feels Harrow around and on and between her bones, crooking her wrist and pumping them slowly in and out while Harrow stifles hiccoughing little whimpers into the sheets. Her hands scrabble uselessly for purchase until Ianthe takes one of them, and on a stupid, sentimental impulse, guides their laced fingers down to Harrow’s clit, working it in tight circles, and Harrow comes with a thin, cut-off cry. 

“Now don’t go anywhere, this’ll only take a minute,” Ianthe whispers, and sits back into her heels.

It’s easy, once you know how, what’s a cock but a handful of blood vessels and spongy tissue? A few dendrites, for spice. It really is the first thing anybody tries.

She knits nerve to nerve, smiling sweetly when Harrow squints suspiciously over her shoulder.

“See something you like? Too big?”

Harrow snorts, head dropping back down.

God, but that girl just _cannot_ get a handle on her pride. Totally demented, running headlong into walls because she can’t bear to turn away. It’s sweet.

Ianthe guides the head of her cock to Harrow’s entrance, pushing in a slow roll that punches a stuttering whine out of Harrow’s throat, and maybe it means something that Harrow reaches back to claw at her hip like she’s trying to pull Ianthe in all at once, that she keens and whimpers until Ianthe’s gotten her whole cock inside, maybe it means something that Harrow’s expression smooths when Ianthe’s filled her, black brows settling into a blissful repose. That her breathing evens out. That her hands get soft, fingers going lax and curled.

Maybe not.

Still.

You could build on that. Good bones.

Her hips buck wildly as Ianthe starts fucking her in earnest, one hand (bone) pushing down between her skinny shoulders, the other (meat) coaxing and insistent around Harrow’s chest, and Harrow’s legs splayed wide and wanting. 

It’s hard to think with Harrow fluttering and clenching on her cock, but Ianthe is—she laughs, breathless with triumph—a necromantic princess of Ida, she is the cleverest goddamn necromancer of her whole generation, because Augustine said to her once, “Joy’s trick relies on a lot of very dull memorizing, because the woman has the creativity of a plank. Lyctoral privacy aside, from a basic anatomical standpoint, you could do much the same with resonance mapping, but try telling _her_ that—” and thought nothing of it until Harrow remade her arm, and then the whole thing made _so_ much sense. You just have to know where things _want_ to be, and they’ll follow. 

_If you build it,_ Ianthe thinks, _she’ll come_.

She reaches out for the wet thump of Harrow’s heart in her chest, for the lacy fringe of her peripheral nerves, for the seaweed snarl of her hindbrain. Cups them tenderly in her metaphorical palm—the bone one, in deference to the Ninth’s delicate sensibilities. Then Ianthe lights the nerves up like Christmas, fires them like bullets, and knits her own nerves alongside them, so they both come together, Ianthe with a luminous, open-mouthed grin, and Harrow with a shuddering cry, like she can’t believe her own body would do this to her.

Ianthe rolls them both onto one side, still joined.

“Go to sleep, Ninth. I promise I won’t let them get you.”

Harrow scoffs, but the sound is fuzzy and vague with exhaustion. There is blood, still, dried around her ears and neck, flaking off in brittle, rusty patches.

She’s too small for the bed, small enough that the top of her head fits under Ianthe’s chin. Too small for the room, with its airy, soaring lines.

Still.

Good bones.

**Author's Note:**

> hit yr bitch up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic or tumblr @thefaustaesthetic


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